


Nailed

by BlindSwandive



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood Kink, Dehydration, Demon Blood Addiction, Demon Dean Winchester, Detox, Dubious Consent, Episode: s10e03 Soul Survivor, M/M, Non-con/dub-con, Omggimmethathammer, Sam Winchester Drinks Demon Blood From Dean Winchester, Season/Series 10, Starvation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-11 03:28:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16467791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlindSwandive/pseuds/BlindSwandive
Summary: An alternate take of Soul Survivor wherein Dean doesn't tire of the game as fast, because the thought of just what all exactly Dean wanted to do with that hammer was too delicious to contemplate.





	Nailed

**Author's Note:**

> I blame Discord and the beautiful people there who goaded this on. Thanks especially to TFWBT for a fantastic beta. Initial dialogue taken whole from 10x3 "Soul Survivor." 
> 
> Also, I recommend checking out the song "Nailed" from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Sam's heart was hammering in his chest.  The chair was empty, the demon cuffs lying open; Dean was loose.  And he was angry, and he was in pain. 

Sam closed his eyes and tried to suppress the swell of nauseous panic in his chest.

As much as he'd like to take the time to process, to review where he'd gone wrong and learn from his mistakes, time wasn't something he could afford right now, so Sam forced himself to tick over into problem-solving mode.  He quickly and silently collected his desiderata and ranked them by priority, strategized about how to proceed, and moved. 

Dean—like this—could not be allowed to leave, to inflict whatever hideous fury and insult he was feeling on the civilians of Lebanon.  That had to be priority one. And Sam couldn't let him escape into the ether, couldn't start over from nothing again. He needed a lockdown.  For lockdown he needed the control room; for the control room he needed keys—

"Come on, Sammy!" he heard echoing through the halls, along with the sounds of smashing, of senseless destruction.  "Don’t you want to hang out with your big brother? Spend a little quality time?"

The thing was, he did.   _God,_ did he. It filled him like hunger, like the emptiness of a sleepless night.  But he knew he'd have to keep on starving until he could dig his brother back out of this monster that was wearing his body, using his voice, back from wherever he was buried under that thick, blackened layer of the Mark and of Demon.

Sam cranked down the switch for the lockdown, and the alarm began to sound.  When the lights cut out, replaced by a dull red glow, a tiny part of Sam relaxed, forgiven.

He might die here, now, but at least no civilians would pay for his mistake.  

On to priority number two: recapture the demon.  Dean would want the lights back and the escape route; if he laid a trap there in the electrical room—

"Smart, Sam, locking the place down. Doors won’t open. I get it."   His voice—it was Dean's voice, in almost all the ways that counted, but that wickedness, that loathing, that hunger… Sam's skin crawled every time the demon spoke.

 _Focus._  Sam took the steps out of the Electrical room two at a time and secreted himself inside one of the emptier storerooms nearby, leaning back against the door to listen.  Dean wasn't bothering hiding his location, walking heavy-footed and bellowing; he was coming, closing in—

"But here’s the thing," Dean hollered, "I don’t want to leave.  Not ‘til I find you."

Sam was pretty sure he didn't mean so they could say goodbye and part on good terms.  He shallowed his breathing until it was as quiet as he could make it. If only he could make his heart cool it with the drum circle bit; he could barely hear the sound of splitting wood and scattering metal over the blood pounding in his ears.

"Sammy!" Dean called, from just outside the door, "You’re just making this worse for yourself, man!"

Right, Sam thought; because Dean would have let him off with a nice, quick death, if he'd just stood there and taken it.  "Pass," he mouthed on the air, steeling himself. Dean must be almost at the Electrical room door by now. 

"Oh, by the way, you can, uh… blame yourself for me getting loose," Dean said, with something that would have sounded pleasant and cheerful if it weren't for the core of sickness beneath. There was a loud clattering, a burden being dropped nearby. "All that blood you pumped into me to make me human… Well, the less demon I was, the less the cuffs worked. And that Devil’s Trap? Well, I just walked right across it. It smarted, but still."

Of course.  In spite of the terror trying to cloud his brain, Sam drew up new plans for once he got Dean back in the chair: keep him in the Devil's Trap but switch to the manacles and latch them with a keyed padlock; check for and remove debris or contraband that could be used to pick the lock; attach the collar with a padlock, too, even if it reduced access to his jugular…  In about the time he thought it would have taken for Dean to get down to the cage housing the electrical works, Sam had come up with a dozen redundancies to frustrate the human aspect of Dean's attempts to get free, once he was no longer demon enough to be held by the wards, but too demon to be allowed loose. Dean was quiet, now, probably deep in the Electrical room, but once he threw the switch to bring the lights back up, Sam would know it was safe to come out.  Then he could get out of this room, and with any luck, make it to the Electrical room door before Dean made it up the stairs, and—

The door Sam was braced against was shoved in, hard, and Sam was propelled away from it, stumbling.  And barely far enough—Dean's hammer swing almost grazed him, making his scalp seize with goosebumps when it brushed through the ends of his hair.

"Nice try, Sammy!"  

Sam cursed silently and reeled on him.  Dean—eyes inkblot black again and smile deceptively easy—was between him and the door, now, and Sam was seriously short on room to maneuver.   _Plan B,_ he scrambled desperately in his mind, as he backed up, he needed a plan B—

"Listen to me Dean," he tried desperately, "we were getting close, okay?  I know you're still in there somewhere, just let me finish the treatments…"  He startled when he bumped into a table; there was no further from Dean he could get.  He prayed—honestly and truly prayed—for God or Cass or anyone to intervene, for Dean to see reason…

Dean turned the hammer he was carrying in his grip, eyeing it like a menu, like he was deciding just what exactly its best use was.  Sam took the opportunity to slide his good arm behind him to pull the demon knife out of his belt.

"You act like I want to be cured," Dean said, shaking his head in disbelief.  "Personally, I like the disease."

He looked like he believed it, too.  Dean took a couple of swaggering steps closer, and Sam let the knife into view as a warning, putting it between them like a shield.

"Dean, stop—look, I don't want to use this blade on you," Sam warned, and Dean shrugged, but slowed his approach.

"Oh, that sucks for you, doesn't it?" he said, laughing, "'Cause you really mean that.  But see, me?" He gestured toward the center of his chest with the hammer. "I'm lucky. Oh, hell, I'm blessed!"

Sam thought Dean's smile was a little too feral to occupy the same space as anything blessed.  His throat worked a swallow on nothing, a tiny tell for his biggest fears, and Dean's black eyes dipped toward the motion, catching him out.  

The feral smile twisted low and satisfied, while he pressed his throat up against Sam's knife.  "'Cause there’s just enough demon left in me that what I'm gonna' do to you? Ain’t no choice at all."

The knife began to tremble in Sam's hand.  He knew he couldn't do it, just the same as he knew he'd die if he didn't.  He tightened his grip, just as Dean tightened his grip on the hammer and swung.

The last thing Sam realized before his unconsciousness came on like a wave was that it was Dean's _fist_ that was connecting with his temple, and not the ball of the hammer.  And with a tiny glimmer of hope alive in his heart, he blacked out.

 

* * *

 

When the sack of flesh that was Sam hit the floor, Dean kicked him once in the ribs, mostly because the opportunity was there and easy.  He rifled Sam's pockets, emptying them of their contents—the keyring, his cellphone, a notepad, a utility knife. Dean left the notepad on the floor, but gathered the rest.  

He pocketed the keyring, even though he knew he couldn't end the lockdown; Sam's cellphone history said his last call had been to Cass, and Dean didn't need the halo coming in and fucking up his plans.  And frankly, the red glow made him feel at home, full and fat and hungry at once. He could do without the alarm blare, but he was pretty sure lockdown was more or less an on/off situation.

Dean strolled out into the hall where he'd dropped the collection of boards he'd torn out of whatever furniture had had the bad luck to get in his way.  He nudged them toward the storeroom, and had just stepped over them to lock the door up behind him, when inspiration struck him.

Quietly, Dean walked back over to Sam's collapsed form, and tugged him by the legs until he was lying more or less flat on his back.  He'd been on his busted shoulder, but that was incidental; Dean just wanted easy access to Sam's pliant, knocked-out face.

Pinching his jaw until Sam's mouth puckered open, Dean carefully drew the blade of the utility knife across the side of his thumb where it hovered over Sam's mouth.  It only bled for a few seconds before sealing shut, dripping hot and dark over Sam's lips, with only the barest trickle making it in onto Sam's tongue, but Dean didn't want to give him too much, anyway; not enough to really fuck with Dean or break the place open.  He just wanted to give Sam enough to taste it, enough to hurt—like the whiff of bourbon to an alcoholic, the flash of a short skirt on a schoolyard. A taste with nowhere to go from there but down.

Sam's throat worked on it in, a reflex against choking.  Satisfied, Dean let go of him, raising his thumb to his mouth to suck the rest of his blood clear, but stopped halfway; the curve of Sam's bottom lip, loose in this state, called something low in him, and Dean reached down again to smear the seam of the cut across it.  He laughed at the red paint—"Lipstick, Sammy, such a chick"—but the laugh was weak and unsettled. It was less funny than it was something else he hadn't quite put a name to, yet.

Hm.  He could think about that later.  Sam looked like he might be starting to stir.  Time to get to work.

 

* * *

 

Sam woke up to a disgusting hammering inside his skull, the kind of throb that makes the world change shapes and colors.  He began to reach with his dominant hand to rub his face, but that compounded the issue, the dull ache in his shoulder blossoming into something queasy.

He covered his eyes with his _left_ hand, then, and tried to breathe normally.  There was an ugly pain in his ribs, too.

It took several seconds for the world to resolve into sense.  His head _was_ pounding with blood, but that pain was dimming quickly; the hammering was worse on the outside.  The red glow was real, too, peeking in around his fingers.

He thought, all in all, he should actually feel a lot crappier than he did.  Huh. He licked his lips, because they felt stiff and cracked, too dry.

Blood, he registered dimly; Dean must have split his lip when he knocked him out.  Sam sighed, and clawed his way up into a sitting position, taking inventory.

He was the one closed inside of a room, now, and the keys—and his cell, and the demon knife—were gone.  That was all bad news. Sam could probably manage to break out of the door if he took apart a filing cabinet, though—there'd be enough hard edges and sharp spots and small parts, he'd be able to find what he needed.  Though it wasn't something he'd look forward to trying with Dean right outside the door.

He assumed Dean was right outside, anyway.  Someone was making a racket, pounding and cracking.

Sam slowly got up to his feet and crept as quietly toward the door as he could; there was no way Dean would hear him over that—

But the hammering gave way to the heavy silence of listening.  Sam froze, a foot from the door.

"Sammy?"

Sam didn't respond.  He let his eyes rove the door jamb and the body of the door; the knob was gone, unscrewed and missing.

There was a soft thump and a creak of wood; Dean had pressed up close, Sam thought.  "Sammy," he said, again, slightly muffled now, "I know you're there." There was a soft susurrus, the shift of fabric on wood as Dean sucked in a long, slow breath, and Sam took a step closer, almost hypnotized.  "I can smell your blood, Sammy. I can hear your heart beating."

Sam's mouth went dry.  He reached out his fingers, laying them as softly on the door as he could, right over where he thought Dean's heart must be.

"I'm right here, Dean.  Let me out, man, we can talk about this…"

A creak of wood, and Sam was pretty sure Dean had pushed back from the door.  A scraping sound started at the ground and ended near where the doorknob had been, clattering across the breadth of the door.  Sam knelt to try to get a look through the gap, and suddenly the dim view was blocked by what had probably been part of a bench.

"Boring," Dean called, and then the wood jumped, bouncing with the collision as Dean started hammering again.

Sam shifted to listen as the sound moved—first right beside the hole, then close to the hinge, then just outside of the jamb to each side.  He experimented with pulling gently on the door, but it didn't give; Dean must have locked it before unscrewing the knob. He put his eye as near as he dared, tipping his vision up and down as far as it could reach.  There were thin strips of red light, but mostly there were boards.

And Sam thought he might just pass out again.  It might be preferable to reality.

Dean was boarding over the door.  Dean was nailing him shut inside of this room to die.

 

* * *

 

Dean closed his eyes and savored the wild pulse through the door.  It felt like Sam's heart was stuck in some wild hummingbird dance, his blood running its course double-time.  

Must have figured it out, then.

Dean whistled to himself cheerfully, and nailed the last board in place.  Even if Sam managed to pick the lock inside the jamb, or tried to bust the wood, he'd still have the boards to contend with, and it should slow him down long enough for Dean to come running.  And honestly, the thought of playing whack-a-mole with Sammy's fingers as they snuck into the spaces between the planks was enough to put a smile on his face. Almost made him wish Sam was up for tearing the door apart.  

If he was, it would be short-lived.

Dean had left Sam with the flask of holy water in his back pocket and little else.  Depending on how much of it he'd already used in boiling Dean's skin, it might give him a cup at best.  He could nurse it as slow as he liked; it wouldn't last him long.

Dean had cheered his own good luck when he realized Sam hadn't been hiding out in a bedroom; the bedrooms all had their own beds and toilets and sinks, all the minor comforts.  This room was spartan and underused, with nothing but a table, a lamp, a few odd filing cabinets, and a collection of banker's boxes. Even the boxes didn't seem to contain anything all that useful, if Dean's cursory pawing was giving him a representative picture.  Papers, record books, almanacs… If Sam wanted to know what had been going on in local weather reports sixty years ago, he was in luck. If he wanted food or water, on the other hand, not so much.

"Dean," Sam was pleading, "don't do this… You don't have to do this…"

"Sure do, Sammy," Dean said, shrugging.  "I tried benign neglect. I tried asking nice.  You just can't leave well enough alone."

"I'll—I'll let it go," Sam said, and there was a note of panic in his voice.  Didn't mean he wasn't lying.

"You never do, Sam.  'S just not how you roll.  So now you can, uh, just sit there and think about what you've done."  Dean chuckled. Yeah, maybe he was acting like an eight year old, but it was fun grounding your brother.

 

* * * 

 

Sam laid his head against the door and tried not to be sick.  His head was pounding dizzyingly, now, and some niggling other sense was pulling at him, alerting him nebulously to need and wrongness.

It wasn't hunger, exactly (not that Sam had been taking the best care with feeding himself since he'd gotten Dean home).  But it was like hunger. He could… could he smell something? Was that what it was? Sam sniffed at the air, and there was a faint acrid tang that reached all the way to his tongue, something sharp like meat, like copper, like the electric zing of a 9 volt on his tongue.  He opened his mouth like a cat, trying to pull the smell into his mouth to taste it, to find out where it had gone wrong.

But there was a sound, too.  It wasn't just Sam's pulse making his head throb, or if it was, it was echoing in stereo.  Dean had stopped hammering, but Sam was sure he hadn't left, and he had the strangest certainty that he could feel Dean's heartbeat through the door, too, the same as Dean had said he could feel Sam's.

Was it… could it just be Dean that he was smelling, tasting, hearing?  The pit in his stomach didn't just feel like dread; it felt like empty need.

For the briefest flash, Sam thought of Famine, thought of that all consuming hunger he'd felt when the Horseman had rolled into town.  Thought of how, after a year of the sense lying dormant, he'd been able to find demons again like some kind of human dousing rod, their tainted blood calling out to him as clear as neon.  He hadn't felt anything like it in years. Not until—

Sam reached to touch his bottom lip with shaking fingers, feeling the corners of his mouth for tender spots or cuts; nothing sang out pain.  He ran his tongue, suddenly clumsy, over his lip experimentally, tasted—tasted how it was wrong, there. Tasted that faintest thrill of electricity.

Dean's blood.

 _Dean's_ blood was on his mouth, _in_ his mouth.  Gritting his teeth, he laid his palm over the hole the doorknob had left, feeling into the doorjamb with his mind for the mechanism, as much an experiment as an attempt to get free.  Something there ground, rubbed, tried to move, but—

Nothing.  He could get the lock to think about budging, could feel it trying, but not so much that it would actually move, not with the resistance of inertia and friction from the housing.

Definitely demon blood.

Definitely not enough.

Definitely too much.

Through the door, Dean was laughing.

 

***

 

Dean sat on the floor, back against the boards, casually flipping the hammer up into the air and catching it on the downswing.  He growled, fierce and happy and feral, "Having fun, yet, Sammy?"

 

***

 

Sam's body wanted to stay glued to the door, close to that—that smell, that taste, that feeling, but his pounding head warned him to get away, to get as far from the door as he could.  It eventually won out, and Sam dragged himself away, hunting around the room for a solid container—a trash bin, a drawer, a box, anything he could throw up into and cover after. But the file cabinet drawers had low sides and backs, the trash bin was wire mesh, and the boxes were all made of cardboard.

Sam cursed in an angry stream under his breath, and started unceremoniously one-armed dumping out the banker boxes.  Maybe if he nested a couple of them together… lined them with a litter of newsprint… (It seemed a shame to destroy primary source material, but he was nearly certain all the newspapers of the era had been microfiched, so it probably wouldn't represent any actual loss of knowledge.  Probably.)

He wanted, just a little bit, to kill Dean.  

Sam sat cross-legged on the floor and dug through the newspapers for ads and stock market coverage and anything else he thought would have the least educational value (just in case).  Awkwardly, then, he nested two boxes, lined the inside with a couple of full sheets, and then started shredding pages, pinning the sheets under one foot and tearing left-handed to do it.  He made sure to make a serious nest; if Dean didn't come to his senses or at least leave long enough for Sam to have a reasonable chance at escape, this would have to be his chamber pot while he was at it.

Yeah.  Definitely wanted to kill Dean.  The demon part of him, anyway.

Sam rifled more boxes on the off chance there'd be glue or a sealant somewhere.  He found an aged pot of glue amidst what looked like an abandoned crop-failure scrapbook effort, but it was so close to empty that he was only able to smear it into the bottom edges of the box.  Better than nothing, anyway.

With a disgusted sigh, Sam started stuffing fistfuls of crumpled newsprint strips into the improvised camp toilet until the box was half filled.  Then, steeling himself, he fished up the paintbrush some long lost Man of Letters had been using with his glue and stuck the wood end down his throat.

He knew it was probably futile.  The blood had probably had plenty of time to get its work done, and probably very little was left in his stomach, but any— _any_ —amount of detox he could get ahead of, any amount of sudden and overwhelming urge and need he could prevent, was worth it.

At least that's what he was going to keep telling himself, as the heaving subsided and left him feeling hungrier and emptier than before.

"Did that help?" Dean called through the door, rough and loud, and that harsh amusement that seemed to lace everything he said these days rubbed raw over Sam's nerves.

"Won't know 'til I know," Sam called back, voice rough with the acid and strain.  He wasn't sure why he was even responding; some part of him hoped some part of Dean—the real Dean—would hear, maybe.

He loosely covered the box and settled back down to shred paper again.  God, he wished he could brush his teeth. It took him a few pages to remember his holy water, and while he didn't dare waste any by spitting, he at least could rinse his mouth and swallow something past the roadkill feeling in his throat.  

"Don't suppose you'd see your way fit to slipping me a toothbrush and some toothpaste," he called, and was pleasantly surprised by how level he sounded.  Only a little bitter. Not scared.

There was a thick silence—hesitation, maybe—and then Dean said, "Won't fit through the boards."

Sam frowned, turning to stare at the door.  Had Dean actually considered it, then?

The tiny itch of hope hung on.

When he'd layered more shredded newsprint over his bile in the box, he covered it again and slid it away into a far corner and tried not to think about it.  He was sure he could still smell it, and was equally sure that that was psychosomatic or else that it was coming from his own mouth. He used the cuff of one shirtsleeve to scrub over his teeth and tongue.  

It would have to do.

Sam started to scoot closer to the door, but the thumping of two pulses in his head was a little too much, so he stayed in the middle of the floor, numbly shredding paper.  

"How long," he began, but his voice was too dry.  Swallowed at his sour mouth, tried again. "How long am I going to be in here, Dean?"

"Idunno," Dean began, and he was the one who sounded surprisingly level this time.  Some kind of false stillness on the surface. 

Sam didn't find that soothing.  What was the old saying? 'Still waters run deep—'

"Long as it takes, Sammy."

'…and the Devil stirs the bottom.'

 

***

 

Dean bored easily, these days.

He always had, really; not when it mattered, not when there was something to be alert for, a stakeout or a monster to fight or a baby brother to protect—

He put that thought out of mind.  He could stay alert when it mattered.  

The rest of the time, though.  Down time. Dean had long coveted easy entertainment, constant stimulation that would wind him up and wring him out and then drop him hard into a deep sleep, free from tossing and turning and nightmares and guilt and fear, the endless, all-consuming fear.  He'd always craved that. He'd just perfected it, since… well, since he'd gotten the hell out of the Bunker. Gone off to howl at the moon.

He mouthed an 'ah-awooooooo,' coyote yipping in his mind.  

But Sam was boring him, now.

The faint shushing sound of paper tearing—over and over again, out of rhythm with the dull pulse of the alarm—was getting on his nerves, and Sam wasn't talking or crying or throwing up or anything.  Boring.

Huffing out a sigh, Dean heaved up from the floor and wandered off.  There were easily a half dozen places in this rat's maze that held old decanters full of brown liquor—at least, if Sam hadn't run through them in one of his I-only-drink-like-a-man-when-Dean's-not-around-to-feel-superior-to modes, trying to drown the guilt of his vicious single-mindedness.  Maybe he'd at least kept the beer stocked.

Dean kept an ear tuned for his prey, but hell if he wasn't going to drink and enjoy some porn while he was here.

When the fridge in the kitchen turned up the better part of a case of beer, Dean indulged in a real howl, triumphant.  He gathered three bottles by the neck in one hand. The other he reserved for the hammer and whatever hard liquor turned up in the crow's nest.

He wandered back past the boarded up door to drop his assortment of liquid entertainment off, then took off again for a laptop and snacks.  He hadn't quite felt the _need_ to eat, exactly, since… well, since, but the craving for junk had always been a more integral part of his personality than that.  Of course it would outlast his mortal coil.

Emergency rations of jerky and gas station packets of powdered donuts didn't so much expire as lose potency, so Dean didn't think twice about the ones he dug out from under his old bed.  He knew better than to even try to check the kitchen for the kind of food he wanted. This would do.

When he rounded the corner toward the boarded door, this time, he could tell that Sam had pressed up close to his side of the door, could tell from twenty paces.  The smell of entropy, the faint rot of uniquely human weakness, was impossible to miss, but Dean didn't mind it. Especially not with that sour wash of panic laced through it.  It reminded Dean of tequila, acrid but sweet and sweaty and biting, too. And the closer he got, the louder the gurgling, wild gush of Sam's blood. And the faster Sam's heart beat.

Dean's mouth carved an uneven smile.  "Miss me, Sammy?" 

Sam didn't say anything, but he didn't crawl away from the door, this time, either, didn't go back to shredding paper.  Dean felt his own blood run a little hotter in his veins, for that, heady with power.

He hunkered down against the boards, again, even though the mismatched pieces made it a bumpy resting place.  He liked the echo of two pulses in his brain, savored the way he could feel the thrum of the beat echoing in his chest, even with the boards and the gap and the door between them.  

Dean flipped open the laptop on his lap and made sure the speakers were turned up while he searched for porn.  His tastes in this department still ran roughly the same way as they always had, too, apart from an increased tolerance for violence.

Well.  Tolerance might not be the right word.

He twisted open a beer and tore open a bag of jerky and pressed play.  He wasn't all that particular about what he watched at the moment, but he wanted it to be noisy and he wanted the noise to be filthy.  And loud enough to carry through the door. And if you couldn't really tell without looking whether those moans were pained or pleased, whether the wet smacks were from the rutting or slapping, well.  So much the better.

He tolerated the plot, such as it was, at least long enough to fill his mouth with tough flesh coated in corn syrup and sriracha (and whatever else they filled this crap with to make it taste so good), and wash it down with beer.  He was just licking his fingers clean(-ish) in preparation to fast forward when the first smack landed, and the leading lady let out her first little indistinct cry. He hovered, just in case it was going to ease back off of the action, but when it proved it had finished screwing around and was getting into the meat of the thing, he stuffed his hand back into the bag and reveled in the grease and the heat and tearing with his teeth.

He took imaginary bets on how long it would take for Sam to start complaining, or back away from the door.  

The jerky was half gone when Dean realized the actors had been at it for at least fifteen minutes without a peep out of Sam.  Dean frowned, tipping his ear to a gap in the boards to feel out for the subtler sounds hiding beneath the weak racing of Sam's pulse.  Breathing—shallow, but not as shallow as if he were sleeping. The occasional rustle of Sam shifting in discomfort. And then—there it was.

Right after a particularly loud crack from the speakers, Dean heard it.  A little shocked hitch of breath, a faint jostle, and Dean could as good as see Sam flinching, the way he always did these days when a violent sound cut in on his brooding.  Dean sneered; big, tough Sam, acting like some kind of jumpy war vet or battered housewife. A tiny part of Dean's brain provided that Sam's soul _had_ spent something like a hundred and eighty years being tortured by Lucifer in Hell, and Dean hadn't been right after a mere forty with Alastair, but he'd never jumped like a little bitch at the first sign of someone getting angry with him.  Hell, Sam hadn't even been this jumpy as a little kid, six years old and scared in the dark in another nameless motel room with only a ten year old to watch over him.

Something about that flinch made Dean see red, these days.  Made him want to bang and crash until he could knock it loose, and then tear that jumpy throat out with his teeth.

When the next blow landed on screen, Dean felt Sam flinch again, and it hit him like a fever coming on, his blood running hot with anger and satisfaction.

"Sorry, Sammy," he called, and didn't even try a little to sound it, "is this bothering you?"

There was a faint sound, a wooden rocking just behind Dean's ear; he was pretty sure the idiot was shaking his head.  As if Dean could see him. He rolled his eyes. 

Anyway, he didn't believe it for a minute.

Still, he could step it up.

Dean took a long swig of brandy and licked his fingers clean again before wiping them off on his jeans.  He uncrossed his ankles and pushed the laptop a little further out, over his knees, and shifted his hips out a tick from the wall, but he waited for a relatively quiet moment on the video to undo the button and slide the zipper out, slow and stretched.  It still wasn't as loud as he'd have liked, especially not with the alarm buzzing on, but he thought the pulse through the door had sped up a little.

Dean pulled his dick out of his pants and then spit loudly into his hand before settling in.

Thirty years in motels in close quarters had given Dean a pretty powerful skillset where stealth masturbation was concerned, but he'd been practicing pushing his brother's buttons for most of that time, too, so it didn't take much effort or focus to play it up.  His breathing got loud and grunting; he made sure his fist landed in his lap with a distinct thwack; he even let out little mutters and moans, cursing encouragingly at the screen.

Yeah—Sam's pulse was definitely up, now.  Dean could picture him, knees pulled up to his chest, arms—well, arm—wrapped around them, head tucked.  Hurting and disgusted and whatever else was keeping him close to the door. Maybe the blood. Maybe that sick desperation to stay close to Dean, whatever the cost.

With a delicious flash of inspiration, Dean thunked his head back against the boards once he was getting close, and groaned out, _"Sammy…"_

Sam jolted or jumped, at that, a rustle and a thunk coming through the door.  His pulse was wild. And there was a smell—nausea? Fear?

Both, maybe.  Whatever it was, Sam was somewhere across the room, now, retching.

Dean came in his hand, happy.

 

***

 

It hadn't been that much blood.  It hadn't, Sam was sure of it.

It had just been enough.  

The dim red bulb and the endless, muffled pulse of the alarm made it hard to keep track of time and harder to sleep, but every few hours (or what felt like every few hours), Sam had to crawl over to the corner and choke out bile.  The nausea came in waves, and didn't seem to care that he hadn't had any food and had risked only a few sparse mouthfuls of water; he threw up until he was empty and then he threw up again anyway.

He sweated until he was more or less empty there, too.  Sam's skin had felt like fire, and he'd managed to strip down to his t-shirt and boxers and get his arm back in the sling just in time to get hit with chills.  The process of dressing and undressing was too tortuous one-armed to repeat, so he'd just covered himself with the discarded layers and sheets of newsprint until the chills passed.  Then he'd had to kick them all back off and lie down on the floor to cool his skin when the cycle started over. Even then, he only got five or ten minutes in one spot before he had to shift to get out of the pool of body heat he'd left behind.  The endless slithering motion he was compelled to keep up in the search for comfort and homeostasis made a traitorous part of him wish for the evil cot and straps in Bobby's panic room; he'd felt like he was going to die, there, just about every minute of every hour, but at least in the dark when he couldn't keep moving, he'd occasionally passed out.

Passing out seemed like too sweet a blessing to even hope for, now.

He _didn't_ hallucinate, this time, for whatever that was worth.  Though he'd doubted his ears, at first, when Dean had started playing what sounded like extremely violent porn and—and—well.  He still wasn't entirely convinced all of that had been real, but he wasn't seeing auras, he wasn't getting visits from anyone _inside_ the room, and no one dead was showing up to torment him, so he was pretty sure he was basically compos mentis.  And the fact that he could review that in his mind and draw conclusions from it bolstered the theory.

Then again, when his only company was the demon in his brother coming and going, taunting and baiting, ghosts might have been a step up.

Dean would turn up and disappear with no pattern Sam could discern.  Though when Sam did try to use some of his grating wakefulness to disassemble a drawer from the filing cabinet for parts, and then use some of the metal bracketing to try to defeat the lock mechanism in the door, Dean had turned up fast to threaten him down.  Between that and the unending lockdown alarm proving the doors hadn't opened (and keeping anyone from teleporting in or out), Sam was sure he wasn't going very far or for very long. For all his talk of wanting to get away from Sam, Dean was definitely keeping a devoted vigil, eating and singing and masturbating (all loudly) right outside, or just sitting behind the door, menace and heartbeat bleeding into Sam's consciousness.

After a day (maybe) or two (maybe), Sam couldn't hear Dean's heartbeat through the door, anymore, and when he retched or managed to doze fitfully for a few minutes (maybe) at a time, he did sometimes manage to lose track of whether Dean was nearby or not.  More than once, Dean had been so quiet through the door that Sam had believed he was alone only to wind up with a knife nicking his fingers when he slipped them through the hole. He was overwhelmed with the ridiculous image of Dean as a giant, black-eyed cat perched outside Sam's mouse-hole, snapping at him with razor-sharp claws every time he tried to peek out.

When the fever passed, a dizzy, lightheaded feeling took over.  Sam thought he vaguely preferred it, since at least then he was able to get dressed again, and sleep by wrapping his head in one of his shirts and plugging his ears with balls of sixty year-old newsprint.  The rawness in his nerves settled, the fever and nausea passed, and he wasn't convulsing at random, so all in all it was an improvement. He wasn't even having to use his box anymore. Small favors.

But his skin felt dry and warm to the touch, beneath the grease of sebaceous sweat, even though his body felt a little too cold, all the time.  And his eyes crossed after reading just a few inches of newsprint, so the itch in his brain craving stimulation just built. And his fingers shook every time he tried to pinch, which slowed down his remaining keep-from-going-insane projects: shredding enough newspaper to fill one of his bundled up shirts (he was making an improvised pillow), and paring down a pencil with the tiny manual sharpener he'd found (he was adding the shavings to the box in hopes the wood and graphite would help control the smell).  Worse than that, though, was when the itch in his brain subsided into blankness, the dim and unfamiliar vagueness of mind; he tried hard to be afraid of it, but couldn't muster the energy.

At least he was sleeping, now.

But when he slept, he dreamed.  He dreamt of the panic room, and he dreamt of the cage, and he woke up to the jarring sound of screaming and laughter.  He mostly could keep track of which was coming from him and which was coming from Dean. Mostly.

Every time Sam took one of his precious sips of water, he held it in his mouth to make the sensation last as long as he could.  His sips were small enough that most of it just absorbed in the end, and he tried to keep his mind going reviewing the mechanisms there, the way the tiny capillaries under the tongue helped absorb things directly into the bloodstream, bypassing the stomach; the way the capillary action would draw water into parched tissues, and osmosis would seek to dilute the salt and pollution by pulling clear water into dehydrated cells.

But eventually "osmosis" stopped meaning anything.

When the water ran out, Sam pinched his skin to watch it distend.  He still remembered the indications of dehydration and wasn't sure how long he would, so he catalogued those on his body, too: no sweat; no urine; dry tongue; skin that stayed pinched when you gathered it, rather than springing back into place; dizziness; fatigue; weak and rapid pulse…  He wondered if there were more that he'd lost track of already. He supposed there were.

An indeterminate amount of time passed in neither sleeping or waking, then.  The line started blurring until he couldn't really see it at all, anymore, but when he stopped being able to tell nightmare from hallucination, he didn't have the strength to panic.  He tried pushing his fingernails into his palm, to banish visions, or he dug through the dust-covered files in his brain for some list to recite to soothe himself, same as he always had when fear threatened to swallow him in the night.  The state capitols (in alphabetical order by city) had always been his first go to, and he thought they were all still there, but he couldn't make the count come up to fifty.

He couldn't figure out which he was missing.  He was too afraid of the shame of failure to try the states, after that.

The Latin exorcism ritual was intact.  He'd joked before that he could do it in his sleep, but after the third time he resorted to it, he found himself reviewing it on loop, not quite sure where it ended.  He forced an 'Amen' in as a stopgap when he'd passed the same line three times and was no closer to an off-ramp, and it needled at him viciously, like an unkillable earworm, until it was suddenly gone and he'd forgotten what he'd been so worked up about. 

When he tried to name all the bones in the body and got stuck only halfway up the foot, he was pretty sure his body was trying to cry, but nothing came out apart from hiccuping breath.

He crawled to the door, then, and curled up with his back against it.  He didn't move for hours. He didn't think he could move again if he wanted to.

He prayed. 

He ached.

Sam remembered hunger; he remembered the times when Dean had hid how dire their situation was for as long as he could, skipped his own meals until Sam had caught him out and forced him to share in whatever they had left.  It hadn't made Sam less hungry, but he'd somehow felt it less when he knew they were in it together. 

But dehydration… being so empty that all the muscles between his heart and his hips ached with it, so thirsty he couldn't feel it anymore, couldn't think anymore… this was a corporeal agony he'd never known.  

He wanted his mind back.  But more than that, somehow, he wanted Dean to be there with him, to share the burden and make it somehow better even though the load was heavier.  He wanted Dean back so hard it hurt.

Sam only realized he'd said Dean's name out loud when a grunted response came through the door.

"Yeah, Sammy?"

For a moment, it sounded enough like Dean that Sam's hazy brain forgot what was going on, dreamt of rescues or at least of shared plights.  "Dean," he said again, choking on it. "Dean, can you—Help, Dean, help me…"

He couldn't make much sound—his throat and tongue were leaden and dry as dust—but Dean heard him.  

Dean heard him, and laughed at him.

"Just a little longer, Sammy.  Just a little longer, and I'll come for you.  Just you wait."

 

***

 

Dean lost track of time, too.  

Once Sam had started sleeping, he got boring as shit, most of the time, and Dean had spent more time wandering, doing target practice with obscenely large weapons, looting for booze, playing with knives and swords.  Sam never even managed to get the door open, so Dean had had to trade hammer whack-a-mole for the nearest knife equivalent (stick-a-prick? knife-a-wife? whatever). It kept him entertained enough, but there was a heat growing under his skin, a deep and burning urge to roam, to cut tethers, to hit, to fuck.

It was fun enough listening to Sam's suffering, to sing whatever he wanted when he wanted, to enjoy his old favorite pornos again, but the junk food and booze were running out, and his hand was nothing compared to a warm body, and blowing up targets was nothing to smashing a face with a fist or a blade until it was barely a face anymore.

But Dean was trying.

Dean was trying to hang on, was trying to delay gratification just a little bit longer, until it would be just right.  

Three days was the woefully inadequate estimate they gave you, for how long a human being could go without water.  Someone as strong as Sam, hidden away in a safe place, away from the sun, could go longer; and depending on how he'd rationed his water, how much he'd had left in the first place, whether he remembered to try to drink his own urine the first time around, it could be more art than science guessing how long he'd last.  Dean just listened for signs, measured Sam's heartbeat against his own, waited for him to crack. He was pretty sure he'd be able to find the moment _before_ the moment when it would be too late, when Sam would just slip into a coma and nothing Dean could do to him would make any difference. Dean wanted the moment right before that, when Sam would still be there but just barely, broken and dirty and weak as a kitten.  That was what Dean needed to see, needed to feel, needed to _own._

When Sam started moaning his name and then cried like a baby through the door, fell asleep still faintly whining with it, Dean felt the heat come over his skin like a fever, jacked off to get some of the boiling out of his blood.  He forced himself to leave the door, but set a timer on his phone for an hour; he wanted Sam dead to the world--deep asleep, anyway—before he got started. Wouldn't work if he woke up too soon. It wouldn't be _just right._ It had to be just right.

Dean only made it forty-five minutes before he couldn't stand it any longer.  It would have to do.

Dean stretched, worked some of the kinks out of his nervous joints, and crept back to the boarded up cell with all the stealth he could muster.  As quietly as he could, he began working the nails out of the lowest boards with the claw end of his hammer, pausing between each of them to listen to Sam's heart, Sam's breathing, to make sure he was still sleeping.

Sam snuffled once in his sleep, a weak and rattling breath, but stayed under.

Dean managed to get all the planks and pieces clear, set carefully aside so they didn't clatter, without waking him.  He hardly believed his good fortune, but didn't they always say, 'good things come to those who wait?' He'd _earned_ this.

Closing his eyes, Dean crouched and laid his forehead against the door, just a little ways above Sam's muffled heartbeat, savoring the anticipation.  With any luck, Sam would be slipping into a dream, now, dumb and numb with sleep…

Dean rolled the handle of the hammer lovingly in his palm.  It wasn't his ancient jawbone, but it felt perfect. It felt like home.

Dean put one knee down to brace himself, curling his toes under like a runner, and raised the hammer high.  

Crashing it into the door was almost as good as sex.  Almost.

The middle panel bounced him back the first time, but with the next strikes began to splinter and split almost immediately.  In seconds, a hole was opening, and a glimpse of heathered grey showed him Sam's mangled shoulder flinching away as shards of wood began raining down on him.  Dean swung lower and closer to him, not backing off when it was clear Sam could only manage to roll toward his belly, clearing barely an inch from the demolition derby behind him.  As far as Dean was concerned, that was perfect. Their pulses were twined in his brain, now, thundering out of time with the alarm but filling his head, blotting out even the smashing sound of steel on wood.  And the smell—the stink of Sam's fear and filth and dying—was like ambrosia, intoxicating and immense, and Dean wanted to bury his face in it and drown.

Somehow, he managed to clear a hole—he had started pulling with the claw end to crack the remains of the door base open, at some point, but he didn't remember doing it.  One minute he was swinging, and the next his hands were greedily clawing through the space, gripping Sam's body, one fist full of tee-shirt and the other of hammer and hair.  Sam was curled on himself like an insect, trying to make the hulking mass of himself small, but when Dean dragged, he slid through the debris with no resistance.

Dean felt too full of blood, overflowing with two pulses, and he felt his eyes go black and his mouth water with the prospect of blood and bone and cum.  He dragged until they were in the middle of the hall, and sank onto his knees straddling Sam's waist, with Sam unmoving below him, dirty and delirious.

There was a ring of dirt around Sam's neck, his hair was clumped with oil and dried sweat, and his eyes were glassy and dilated.  His skin was somehow greasy and dry at once, rough with salt, and he smelled exactly like he should after five days of detox and dying, but Dean wanted him so much it hurt.  He had never wanted anything more.

Hammer still in his fist, Dean dug his fingers into Sam's tee and yanked until his limp body leapt up, mindless of the tearing fabric.  Sam tried to respond, tried to lift a hand and roll his face away, but his head fell back, too great a weight for him, and his long neck was bared, bobbing desperately.  Dean buried his face there, and didn't know whether he was going to lick or bite until he'd already latched on, sucking salt and the slick oil of fear-sweat and bruises from Sam's sallowed skin.  He bit, too, hard enough to mark, to bring blood into the grooves, but he didn't tear his throat out; he was just enough in control of himself for that.

Sam made some garbled protest, pain and confusion coming off him in waves, but his weakness—his perfect, all-consuming weakness—came off him like light, glaring and bright and delicious.  Dean couldn't remember his brother being this weak since—since ever. Since he was a tiny, wailing infant in Dean's arms, thrashing in the orange fireglow of their burning home. Maybe not even then.

Dean tore the tee further, thrilling to the way it jerked Sam's ragdoll body.  The sling was in the way, though, damaging the view by holding some part of Sam in place, in reserve; Dean tossed the hammer down and bit down on the inside of his own cheek to clear his head enough to find the strap, yanking on the velcro until it opened and let the strap slide free.  The weight of Sam's dead arm pulled against it until it came undone completely, then the arm dangled out loose beside and behind him, even as Sam made a sound like a bad hinge, scraping and wrong.

Dean snaked his arms around Sam's ribcage, clutching him tight and biting marks down his stuttering chest while he ground his dick into Sam's waist through their jeans.

Sam was trying to speak, trying to cry, and Dean pricked his ears to it, swallowing the broken sound up like water.  "Dean," he thought he heard, and "Help," and Dean was deeply glad he'd already come an hour ago or he might have fired off right there, on the high of that stupid desperation, of Sam's mangled hope.

Dean stuffed one hand down between them to wrestle with the buttons of their jeans.  He managed to get the zippers down, when Sam let out a short, sharp sigh, and slipped into unconsciousness.

Dean dropped him onto the ground abruptly, startled, skin buzzing.

Sam landed with a thud, and didn't make a sound.

"Fuck," Dean muttered, and pried at his eyelids, pawed at his jugular out of habit before realizing he could still feel Sam's pulse in his own chest—it had just gotten dangerously weak.

Dean balled his fists, but punched the ground beside Sam's vacant head, instead.  Maybe he'd waited too long, after all.

No.  No; he could fix this.

Dean fumbled in his back pocket for a knife, and ran a deep cut into the center of his thumb.  The pain felt otherworldly, somehow, not really present through the thrum that was making his whole body vibrate, but the blood welled to the surface—a few drops, at least—and he stuffed it into Sam's slack mouth, rubbing the cut into his dry tongue until it began to soften, and the cut began to close on its own.

Dean withdrew it to reopen the cut, wishing he'd thought to bring the demon blade—those cuts at least lingered open a little longer.  Still, this might be best, since he'd have to be careful about what he gave Sam: enough to wake him up, to make him hungry; not so much it gave him power over Dean.  It was a fussy balance. Dean didn't do fussy very well, these days.

"Cross your fingers," he said aloud, and carved into his thumb again.

This time, when he pressed it to Sam's tongue, the tongue pulsed against him while Sam's throat worked weakly on the drops.  When he did it a third time, Sam's mouth closed on him, apparently involuntarily, and Sam was suckling on Dean's bloody thumb like an infant.

That gave Dean a very, very good idea for getting back on track.

Dean withdrew his thumb again and switched hands, cutting open the pad of his left thumb this time.  Sam mouthed on the air helplessly, fingers curling weakly where they lay on the floor. While Dean slid his thumb it between Sam's teeth, far enough back to hold his molars apart, he dropped the knife and used his dominant hand to finish opening his pants, freeing his dick.  Sam was trying to curl his head closer, to get Dean's thumb over his tongue, to close his mouth around it, but he was easy enough to thwart.

"You want something to suck on?" Dean asked, digging his thumb in farther to push Sam's teeth further apart.  "Can do." And he fed his dick, almost as hard as the hammer, into Sam's hungry mouth.

Sam coughed when he pushed too far, but the desperate way he was trying to draw on Dean's thumb (and by accident, his dick), and the artless, needy way his tongue rolled, was enough to make Dean's entire spine catch fire.  Sam's mouth felt like pure, desperate heat, and Dean dragged his head up by the hair to get closer, to get more of himself inside. Sam didn't fight; Sam tried to swallow him whole.

When the cut stopped flowing, Sam started groaning needily, mouth slackening, so Dean sawed his thumb over Sam's molars to try to keep it open.  It throbbed dully, instead, and eventually he cursed and pulled out. 

Sam's head lolled on the ground, and he lifted a hand to his face, slowly, like he was reaching through sludge rather than air.  It took him a few tries to find his mouth with it. He couldn't seem to make his eyes work right, either, the lids twitching and the sliver of white Dean could see rolling blindly.

Still, it was an improvement over straight up unconsciousness.

Dean pried Sam's lids up again, and this time the pupils contracted a little at the red light, but Sam was still more or less insensate.  Dean slapped him lightly—or what he meant to be lightly, anyway, though it broke something open in Sam's mouth, knocking a trickle of blood onto his cheek.  

Curling low, Dean dragged his tongue through the red flecks, and imagined a little wildly that they somehow _tasted_ like Sam's pain, Sam's fear.  He dipped his tongue into Sam's mouth to chase more of it, felt it somehow in his tongue like a buzzing, and he thought his eyes would roll up in his head.

 _'More'_ was his only coherent thought.

Dean sucked Sam's lower lip into his mouth, biting down until even in this state Sam let out a little indignant sound, trying to tip away.  He fisted in Sam's hair to keep him still, and sucked hard.

He wasn't imagining it; there _was_ something there, like a surge of adrenaline through his body bringing his skin alive and standing all the hairs up on end, and Dean muffled curses into his brother's mouth and tried to eat him alive.  It felt like fire, like… like a fight, but a _good_ fight, one from before this strange half-existence.

Dean dug an arm under Sam's neck, baring his split lip and the softest part of his throat, where the red print of Dean's teeth was still visible.  He bit down over the grooves until the skin broke and Sam creaked out a sound of pain that vibrated his throat, buzzing the skin under Dean's lips.

"Dean," Sam managed, weak and papery.  It was pleading, but for what was another question. 

Only half aware he was doing it, Dean fumbled around to find the knife and gripped the blade hard until he felt something split.  It'd do; he let go and mashed his palm against Sam's mouth, stifling his protest and bleeding into him at once.

Sam had probably wanted Dean to stop tearing him open with his teeth, on reflection.  But Dean figured he wanted the blood, too, even if he didn't want to want it. And making him take what he didn't want to want, well… that was a lot more fun.

Sam let out a muffled sound, against his hand, but Dean just sucked and laved at his brother's blood and waited for Sam to give in and do the same.  Under the thrill of the electric singing in his veins, he couldn't think of anything that would be more perfect than that, than completing their endless fucked up feedback loop in a circuit of mouths and blood.

Eventually, Sam seemed to come to the same conclusion, and long fingers—first clumsy and drifting and soft, then increasingly tight and needy—wrapped around Dean's wrist, and a broad, flat tongue was digging into the lines of his palm.  Even Sam's busted arm was trying to get in on it, curling up over the back of Dean's head like Sam was trying to cradle him close as a suckling infant.

Dean grunted satisfaction into Sam's neck, and fumbled between them again for his neglected dick.  As an afterthought, he dug until he could get Sam's free, too, mashing them together in his palm. Sam was soft as cotton in his hand, warm and insipid, but was starting to come to life under Dean's pawing.  (Or maybe from the trickle of blood into his mouth. Whatever.) 

"There y'go.  Good boy," Dean mumbled against him, when Sam sank his teeth into Dean's palm at his mouth and surged up into the other.

The feeling of Sam filling with blood, then, of him slowly engorging against Dean in a swell of hot pressure, was enough to make Dean's eyes try to roll up in his skull, his hips pulsing in a stuttering drive to be nearer, closer than skin.  

And yeah, Dean had kinda' lost track of his endgame.  It had been so clear— _break him._ Starve Sammy and then smash and fuck and bite and leave him there destroyed.  And it was still there, sort of; Sam's pathetic little guilt-ridden soul wouldn't cope with grinding off against his brother, with drinking demon blood after all these years, with failing Dean, or with Dean hurting and using him so completely without care.  But it was all somehow… less, now. Subsumed under hunger and want, under the burning in his blood and the need to consume this weak and desperate thing beneath him, to meld them together into one ugly and broken thing, a single endless circle of blood and violence.

And yeah, maybe he was starting to get why Crowley kept shooting up, now.  Not that it didn't hurt—not as bad as the direct shots of sanctified blood to the jugular had, at least—but there was an effervescence to the boiling, now, the fever and burning all bubbling and buzzing beneath the surface better than all the mindless screwing and singing and drinking had.   _This_ was what he'd thought he was in for when he set off to go howling at the moon. _This_ was pure, all violence and victory and chase and thrill.

Sam was trying to speak against his palm, and Dean's first thought was just to press down harder, stifle him, grip them together tighter in his other hand where they were both rigid and sticky, but Sam's grip on his wrist was getting stronger and he managed to twist around enough to free his mouth.  Long enough to spit blood and saliva into Dean's healing palm.

"Dean—" he said, hoarse, pushing the wet hand away—pushing it down, "s-switch—"

Dean's brain took a few seconds to come up from under water enough to understand that, but then he groaned into Sam's throat.  In an instant he'd replaced his dry hand at their groins with his dominant hand, now slick with his own blood and Sam's spit, and let his mouth take over the job of stifling Sam's mouth.

Everything then was teeth and tongues and mindless biting and grasping and rutting.  In his hand, together, they felt as right as the hammer had, pressing hot and hard against one another, slippery but barely yielding.  He bit Sam's lip and Sam bit his tongue, harder, sucking it with force and purpose, like he was starved for it—which, fair enough. A little blood wouldn't heal days of dehydration, but it was as near as water to a dying man as you could get.  Hurt like hell, though—Sam might have nicked the artery—so Dean laid his free hand on Sam's neck and squeezed a warning, try that again and—

Some kind of strangled sound came out of Sam then, and Dean's grip slid suddenly easier, wet with Sam's cum.  He didn't stop to investigate, though; the sound Sam was making was so full of ache and satisfied gluttony that it dug into his spine, his skin, and with the heat in his veins—now getting just this side of too much to bear—he came on Sam's belly, tightening his grip on their joined dicks and on Sam's neck just to make him suck air and gag.  He could barely hear or see over the throbbing in his skull and veins, over their racing hearts, over the black ringing his vision and narrowing his world to Sam's contorted face.

He hadn't felt anything like that since… well, since the last time he'd fed the mark its tribute of blood and bone.  Sex had been fun, and he came more or less whenever he felt like it, but the dim numbness that had consumed him since becoming a sort-of-demon had made the sensation feel like it was coming to him through a haze, like his ever-healing skin wasn't his own.  Everything here, in this moment, felt… unfiltered, raw and heady and full of thrill but full of pain, too.

The pain—the pain was all at once amplifying into something unbearable, and Dean fell off of Sam and curled in on himself, roaring and clutching his skull.

Sam was moving nearby, rolling over, but Dean couldn't move, couldn't watch, couldn't think.  The alarm was now the cruelest thing in the universe, surely dissolving his eardrums, his grey matter.  When it stopped, the lapse in agony felt like bliss, but the lights coming back on proved just as painful, somehow penetrating his closed eyelids and clutching fingers.

"Sammy," he croaked out, "what—what did you—?"

 

***

 

Sam hadn't needed to crawl far to see through the door of the electrical room.  The switch had flipped for him easily, then. He was still weak as a kitten, starved and desperate, but high enough on adrenaline and Dean's blood that it didn't matter much.

Trembling, he crawled over the curl of Dean's body, tipping his brother's face up as much with his mind as hand.  And though it felt surreal, coming through some strange fairytale haze, Sam bent in, nudged his face between Dean's hands, and kissed him to lick the blood from his lips, his mouth.  Dean's tongue was still bleeding sluggishly—Sam had mauled it and sucked at it like the font of life—but he was sure Dean hadn't had so much of Sam's blood that he'd lose the power to heal completely.  However many prayers and confessions Sam had made in that tiny room, waiting to die.

His blood might be sanctified enough to hurt, but it would still take a lot more to drag Dean back to humanity.

Sam could stand—barely—and staggering through the halls took all of his strength, but pulling Dean along behind him on the tether of his mind came easy.  The sound of him groaning and dragging, heavy, through the soft clattering of shards of wood, was a soothing and strange replacement for the alarm that they hadn't had any real escape from for days, and it did something to quiet Sam's soul.  He didn't dare let up on his mental squeeze of Dean's heart, though, or the raw sawing over Dean's nerves—not until he had him safely tied back down. But he'd stop, then. Probably. 

Maybe.

He'd surely stop hurting him whenever Cass showed up.  Sam wondered if he'd have stayed at the door for all that time, checking it moment to moment for the instant the lockdown ended, if he was even now breaking through.  Or if he'd have given up, eventually leaving for food and rest, and might not be back for another hour, another day.

Yeah—he'd let up on Dean whenever Cass got there to help.  It wouldn't be long, one way or another. Sam had survived the last week; Dean would survive this one.  Sam was almost certain, this time.


End file.
